and Wilkie Collins,--for no other reason, apparently, than that he
never, with Chinese accuracy, gives us gossiping drivel that reduces
life to the dregs of the commonplace, or snarls us in any inextricable
tangle of plots.

Charles Reade is not a clever writer merely, but a great one,--how
great, only a careful _résumé_ of his productions can tell us. We know
too well that no one can take the place of him who has just left us, and
who touched so truly the chords of every passion; but out of the ranks
some one must step now to the leadership so deserted,--for Dickens
reigns in another region,--and whether or not it shall be Charles Reade
depends solely upon his own election: no one else is so competent, and
nothing but wilfulness or vanity need prevent him,--the wilfulness of
persisting in certain errors, or the vanity of assuming that he has no
farther to go. He needs to learn the calmness of a less variable
temperature and a truer equilibrium, less positive sharpness and more
philosophy; he will be a thorough master, when the subject glows in his
forge and he himself remains unheated.

He is about the only writer we have who gives us anything of himself.
Quite unconsciously, every sentence he writes is saturated with his own
identity; he is, then, a man of courage, and--the postulate assumed that
we are not speaking of fools--courage in such case springs only from two
sources, carelessness of opinion and possession of power. Now no one, of
course, can be entirely indifferent to the audience he strives to
please; and it would seem, then, that that daring which is the first
element of success arises here from innate capacity. Unconsciously, as
we have said, is it that our author is self-betrayed, for he is by
nature so peculiarly a _raconteur_ that he forgets himself entirely in
seizing the prominent points of his story; and it is to this that his